bistritapcv

My Droid Eris stopped working so Verizon had to factory reset. Before they did, they saved all my contacts, did the reset, and then loaded the contacts back in.
Then when I did a sync with Google contacts they were in my phone contact list
twice. One like "Chamberlain, Anthony" and one "Chamberlain\, Anthony" (the one
with the \ was the one backed up by verizon). Every contact was like this. The
ones with "\| had pictures, etc so I wanted to save those. And not all had backslah but all were duplicates.

So on my phone I went and deleted one duplicate of each contact (300 or so). Kept
the one with the pictures. I want to sync back to my Google contacts but I don't
know which will take precedence. Will my phone override, and all the duplicates in
the Google contacts be removed, or will Google contacts override and put all the
duplicates back into my phone?

Is there a way to control that?

mhotovec

For future reference, change one, then test to see what happens.

The way a sync SHOULD work is that the system with the most recent changes overwrites the other system. So in theory changes could flow both ways in the same sync process. Now if the Google sync works that way, I can't say for sure.

However I did notice on the Google mail website (via computer or browser, not the gmail app) that there is a 'check for duplicates' option. So if the worst happens when you sync and you get all the duplicates back you might be able to more easily remove them using a computer and going online to you Google mail account.

Good luck, keep us posted.

superchaos

I also have seen a merge option on gmail contacts.

Pitamakan

I definitely had some weirdness when I did my initial sync, including the appearance of a lot of duplicate entries ... but after a long round of manual cleanup the problem hasn't recurred. For me, at least, the problem might have been caused by the fact that the Google contacts setup includes a group called "my contacts" and one called "all contacts," which essentially seem to duplicate one another.

Another bit of weirdness in that general area comes from the Facebook integration feature. Doing that added an <sn> tag in the notes field of Google Contacts entry for each of my Facebook friends. Anyone know anything about that? Deleting the tag in Google contacts doesn't seem to cause any ill effects, but I want to be sure before i get rid of them all.